Moderates United

I have an idea for a reality show. Take people who have been on some form of public assistance their entire lives, give them tasks for which they are not prepared, and see who can succeed. For example, you dump building materials in a parking lot somewhere, leave a blueprint, and see who can organize the project and get it done. You could pay for the college, or vocational training of the winner. Maybe every participant gets something–for example a job.

This is the sort of model that needs to be on display. Currently, the motto seems to be “get rich (by luck) or die trying”. Rather than seeing a pathway to progress, teens in ghettos (and I would include here all the chronically unemployed of all races in countries like Britain and France) engage in risky behaviors of all sorts, including not just drug dealing, but assuming that some sort of athletic or musical talent will get them out. They do on occasion, but rarely.

We need to be clear that black people in this country have been segregated more or less as a conscious policy of Democrat policy-makers, who have insisted that their path forward consists in electing and reelecting the same people who fail them year-in, year-out. Every election cycle, the promised manna falls in small bits, but never enough to fundamentally alter anything, with the major exception of the cost/benefit analysis as it regards out-of-wedlock parenthood.

Currently, African-Americans are incarcerated at a rate at least three times that of European-Americans. Yet, as I understand the matter, if you correct for single parent households, this disparity disappears. White Americans that are raised in single parent homes commit crimes at the same rate as black Americans also raised in single parent homes. This is, then, not a racial difference at all, but a cultural difference, and the culture in question cannot be understood outside of the politics of separation, resentment, and victimhood that have been playing in the ghettos ever since Jesse Jackson used the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. to launch his own brand of political entrepreneurialism.

To the point, the message is that no matter what you do, what decisions you make, you deserve something from others. That personal responsibility is not a primary virtue, and that anger combined with political agitation is the pathway to the future.

For his part, Jackson’s business has done well. He has made a lot of money. But he has not helped anyone help themselves. The best he ever gets for anyone is a place at a feeding trough filled with food provided by other people.

He does not produce producers. He does not produce self respecters. He does not produce wealth. He does not produce innovation. He does not produce GOODNESS. The seeds he has sown produce burning buildings, of the sort seen here some time ago, and quite possibly soon enough again.

Rant over.

Religion is the only human cultural system preoccupied full time with the problem of meaning. Philosophy thinks about it, but does so in the abstract, and has no ritual, art, or other associated tradition.

Art, in the form of aesthetics, for its part, does not take as its primary task the creation of meaning. Art can enable you to transcend difficulties, but has not historically treated it as the primary objective, in the secular tradition.

The task is to transmute pain into acceptance. To tie people together, not just as communities, but as in-dividuals. Only religious art, in the broadest possible sense, does that.

To reject religion, then, is to reject meaning formation. Socialism, quite literally, is a system which is self destructive on the most basic level. It is not economically productive, leads to political tyranny, homogenizes truth, and rejects the possibility of individual meaning formation, which of course is the only place it could ever form, since none of us can exist as abstractions.

Does George Soros produce anything? What he seems to do is sow and profit from chaos.

In this, he differs from most corporations. All jobs, wealth, and production in this and most other nations comes from corporations. Government sucks up the wealth thrown off by the productive use of capital, redistributing it to bureaucratic elites, ostensibly in support of redistributing it to “the poor”, but of course no leftist really cares about the poor enough to pursue policies which actually help them.

All a corporation is is a shield that limits personal liability. As a way of limiting risk it is simultaneously a means of stimulating risk-taking, of the sort that underlies all of our economic progress. Ford started somewhere. Edison–founder of GE–started somewhere.

Thus it is the height of idiocy to simultaneously decry “corporate greed”, and rising poverty. Corporations create wealth. What creates long-term poverty is government interference in the private sector.

The obvious example, to me, is the use of minimum wage laws, which are intended to raise the living standard of the poor. What happens in reality is that you increase unemployment. Some people get poorly paid jobs; and the rest get no jobs at all, but long term endurance on the dole. This leads to frustration, and the failure to learn the skills which are necessary to be worth more than minimum wage to someone, which in turn is the only stable way to rise up in the world.

I am seeing even the Israelis–who as a very educated people one would have thought would understand the most basic economics–agitating for leftist policies.

We need to be clear: minimum wage laws are not untested ground. Rent control is not untested ground. Both have been tried, often, and around the world, and ALWAYS result, in the first case, in rising unemployment, and in the second in the rationing of housing and skyrocketing property prices, and/or in the complete decline in the value and livability of what property is available. These are the predictable outcomes of assuming that prices exist in a vacuum, separated from the rational decisions of rational people.

So much childishness: how does it persist? God only knows. I could speculate, but I won’t here.

There is nothing particularly deep about sadness, except to the extent that those unable to feel it deeply are necessarily emotionally constrained, and hence superficial.

Love always contains the possibility of sadness, as well as, of course, joy, humor, fun and all the other positive emotions.

To live you have to be able to move, and this means you cannot have any closed black doors that say “do not enter.”

I liked this song, which is currently a hit, and playing on the radio, till I started hearing something about “outrun my bullets”.

Why in God’s name is this crap on the radio? Yes, it’s a catchy tune, but one about a mass murder of school children.

Robert’s got a quick hand
He’ll look around the room
He won’t tell you his plan
He’s got a rolled cigarette hanging out his mouth
He’s a cowboy kid
Yeah, he found a six-shooter gun
In his dad’s closet hidden in a box of fun things
And I don’t even know what
But he’s coming for you, yeah, he’s coming for you

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You’d better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You’d better run, better run, faster than my bullet
x1

Daddy works a long day
He be coming home late, yeah, he’s coming home late
And he’s bringing me a surprise
Because dinner’s in the kitchen and it’s packed in ice
I’ve waited for a long time
Yeah, the slight of my hand is now a quick pull trigger
I reason with my cigarette
And say your hair’s on fire
You must have lost your wits, yeah

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You’d better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You’d better run, better run, faster than my bullet

Individualism is nothing but the creed that truths can be perceived by individuals, and that by comparing notes, we can more consistently and accurately approach the useful, which is to say the true.

Opposed to it is, and can only be, dogma, which is to say “truths” articulated by specific individuals–named or unnamed–and codifed by those in power into what is supposed to be consensus truth, a truth that is “out there” rather than one that arose in specific times and places.

For example, the Catholic Church was anti-individualist in the Middle Ages, and remains largely so to this very day. There is a Church creed that is superior to all individuals. If you are in the Church, you must accept Church doctrines. Period.

On the other side we have various totalitarianisms. No doubt one of the reasons Mussolini found Keynes so attractive was his rejection of individualism. Fascism is a system in which truth, per se, is conflated with the judgement of the Leader. No other truths can exist. They are suppressed by whatever means are necessary, which include mainly threat of force, but actual force as needed.

Liberalism, as I use the term, is the only political system consistent with individualism, since liberty and individualism go hand in glove.

Conversely, no matter what words surround the claim, any argument that individualism is counter-productive in any way is necessarily a call for tyranny.

To be clear, there is nothing in the creed “you can make up your own mind” that prevents charity, kindness, altruism, and all the other ooey-gooey things that Leftists claim to care about, and the opposites of which they consistently practice.

There is no society so stable it cannot be wrecked by enough Leftists trying to “help” it.

Now for something completely different.

I had not read this before–and although names are named, this is of course amenable to reasonable criticism–but Neil Armstrong did, according to some reports, in fact see UFO’s on the moon.

According to the NASA Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the Aliens have a base on the Moon and told us in no uncertain terms to get off and stay off the Moon. According to un-confirmed reports, both Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin saw UFOs shortly after that historic landing on the Moon in Apollo 11 on 21 July 1969. I remember hearing one of the astronauts refer to a “light” in or on a crater during the television transmission, followed by a request from mission control for further information. Nothing more was heard. According to a former NASA employee Otto Binder, unnamed radio hams with their own VHF receiving facilities that bypassed NASA’s broadcasting outlets picked up the following exchange:

I think I have mentioned this, but “conspiracy” thinking is what I call paradigm thinking. In my view, the quickest pathway to rapid scientific advancement is trying to find ways to new paradigms. New paradigms cause us to look for new things in new places. For example, before Einstein there would have been no point trying to see if light curved around the sun.

All a conspiracy theory does is say that certain fundamental elements in our consensual reality are false. Self evidently, when you are dealing with circumstantial, anecdotal “unnamed” professors, you have to be careful. Yet, I think all good minds have to remain open. You can look at things like this and just say “that would be interesting”, and then move back on to your thesis on economic conditions in Imperial Japan, or some recondite experiment in genetics. It need not alter your worldview.

To the point, you need not label it in any way other than “different”, and “potentially interesting”.

Once you grasp things like how the Fed works, or the sheer lunacy of not being able to get a legally valid document from our President that is required for all first time drivers and all passport applications, then it becomes obvious that large, important things can and often do sit in the open, and that pointing out the proverbial elephants in the room–or their footprints, or even the possibility they may be there–is symptomatic of nothing but mental and emotional health. The sick ones are those who lie to themselves to fit it.

Be that as it may, I spend no time worrying about these things. I will many months without thinking about them. I ponder things I can ponder productively; the rest I let go.

In my view, most men and women would prefer traditional sex roles, if they did not feel they were being taken advantage of. Most women would like to stay home and raise children, and most men would like to have a woman taking care of the affairs of the house. Most women want a decisive man who knows what he wants and most men want a nurturing woman who will salve their wounds, and protect their masculine pride.

This is not all men and women, of course. What we have now is an uneasy dance, in which neither side can assume the other will play its role. Many women feel like they are taking care of overindulged children; or, on the contrary, that they are disposable. When men don’t act like men, women see no reason to act like women.

To be clear, my own vision is something like that of the chivalric ideal. Women want to be on pedestals, and they want to be equal. They also want the man to be in charge. This is confusing for men, but basically I think if men make decisions, take care of themselves, and treat women with respect, the women can fill in the gaps. That’s what they do. I know of few women who have not endured quite a bit of crap, even in long term relationships. That’s what women do, and they do it better and more naturally than men. That’s my view.

But the point of this post is this: self evidently, many would not agree with me. I am looking forward to what our social orders might look like in 20 years, and what seems obvious to me is both that people instinctively crave cultural clarity–something telling them who to be and what to do–and that they sometimes need to break away from that order.

Let us say that the above describes 80% of men and 70% of women. What of those who don’t like that order? Simple: they move somewhere else. The San Francisco’s of the world are not just acceptable in my view–they are NECESSARY. I want freedom for everyone. This includes the emotional intelligence to accept cultural difference, which would include accepting people’s right to disagree with your own lifestyle choices.

This structure, combined with historical ignorance, is the most powerful Leftist argument against Conservatism, or what I call Liberalism.

Always, it is assumed at the outset that if you are not a Leftist, that you are opposed to bringing wealth to the poor, and justice to the wronged. Whatever arguments you might make in your own favor, these detriments are assumed at the outset.

In this strange world, balancing the budget “on the backs” of the poor is unjust. Yet, we have 50% unemployment among the youth of our ghettoes. This situation will only get worse as the economy gets worse, and the economy will not get better until business owners–particularly small business owners, who create most of the jobs and pay most of the taxes–feel confident in the future. You don’t sit on piles of cash unless you have a good reason. Huge–record–uncertaintly is a good reason.

The point I want to make clear here is that the choices are between high taxes, high unemployment and high rates of poverty, and low taxes, low unemployment and low rates of poverty. There is nothing to commend the first, and claiming otherwise is, if one understands history, a naked lie.

This concept of the Room is in some respects analogous to that of the Sphere, a movie by that name, if memory serves. The Sphere would bring to life whatever was at the center of your true consciousness; in some cases, this was not something pleasant, and resulted in at least one death, as I recall, and substantial danger for more.

I have often argued that Goodness consists in knowledge, and that growth consists in gradually eradicating from the movement of your personality all of the things that you normally would feel the need–on some level–to hide. This hiding can be from your conscious mind, or from others.

One of the roles presumably played by cults of evil–Satanic cults, examples of which would include for my purposes all cults including ritual torture and murder, as for example the Aztecs and headhunters–is externalizing unpleasant thoughts and sharing them with others, such that the need to hide one’s rage disappears. You can accept it in yourself, since you see it accepted by others. This does not make this a functional adaption, but it erodes the isolation that hate builds. Even Sade found it desirable, in his “300 days of Sodom”, to create a core group of four Satanists, who committed their crimes, in large measure, together.

The Room, then, if it grants you your heart’s innermost wish, acts as a mirror to tell you who you are. What comes out is who you really are. Most people do not want to know who they really are.

A Good person, however, has lit all his rooms. Water swirls about, but it is clear, so what is on the surface is congruent and indistinguishable from what is deeply beneath the surface. A good person is transparent.

Yet, what does this clarity grant you? The ability to see more deeply into the universe. You are no longer in your own way. Thus, in Goodness there is more latent complexity and order than in evil, which consists mainly in many dark, decaying rooms, none of which communicate in an honest ways with the others. Loneliness can be diminished in shared crimes–and through the connection with the victim through violence–but never released. True tranquillity is never possible.